]]>With the changes to Google’s ranking algorithms (Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Pigeon) and the information available in Google Analytics it’s an obvious question “What is the continuing relevance of Google Analytics to SEO?”

Well, as it happens, there are good reasons to want to look at Google Analytics to give you ideas as to what you need to do to improve your search engine optimisation. Whilst you no longer have access to many of the raw keywords and phrases used to reach your website you still have feedback on how you’re doing and therefore how you might improve. In fact, that’s the core reason for wanting to look at analytics in any circumstance.

Bounce Rate in Context

In 2015 SEO practitioners are stressing the extent to which time on site bounce rate and. the pages per session seem to be important factors that influence Google in its ranking choices. All of these can be seen in Google Analytics reports for the various pages on your website. So you can get a good idea as to how long those who come to your website are staying.

A really good infographic on pinterest & digitalinformationworld.com drew attention to the extent to which bounce rate should be thought of in context. I’ve pulled outsome of the key points and put them in the image that you’ll see next to this article.

So there is no ideal bounce rate for a website; it depends what kind of website you’re running. You’ll see that service sites are typically very low 10% to 30% on average; while blogs are pretty high. 70% to almost 100%. Let’s step back and have a think about why this might be.

A website where somebody goes to look for a service is likely to have lots of information across a range of pages. And as soon as more than one page is involved. Google’s bounce rate is by definition zero. So if you have this kind of site, it’s natural to expect visitors to come and look at the number of pages. This doesn’t mean they go away satisfied, it just means that the bounce right statistic suggests they liked your site.

By contrast, a blog will have a number of articles and people are often coming from somewhere else to read a specific single article. So unless you’re lucky and something else on the blog grabs their attention, they’ll.only read that one article. So it would be nice to look at the time on the page. Sadly, unless you’ve done something clever Google will not be able to tell you that. So you might have good numbers of visitors who like your content, and read your articles but they only ever read one at a time. So looking at bounce rate in isolation the site may look bad.

It’s the same for landing pages 70-90%. I confess I’m puzzled why lead gen has supposedly got a so much lower average bounce rate than landing pages. After all the generation typically relies on landing pages. The reason bounce right on the landing page can be high is fairly obvious. Visitors are typically arriving in response to a specific offer. If 2/10 say yes and the other 8/10 say no you have an 80% bounce rate.

Having said all this infographic went on to point out that there are a number of ways of reducing bounce rate. And all other suggestions are good. A bit like motherhood and apple pie. If you had the opportunity to do any and all of them on any web page then you should.

]]>Our most recent Analytics Half Hour covered event tracking for outbound links. Essential if you run a business that isn’t completely isolated.

Transcript
Hello and welcome along to our analytics half-hour.

This afternoon we’re going to tackle links to external sites. This is an issue that affects any businesses that is part of a value chain. Sometimes these external links are called outbound links. They tend to be the unloved cousin of the inbound link which is much loved by SEO practitioners

So we’ll look at why external links can be very valuable in business terms, and therefore the usage is worth tracking.
So with that, let’s get going

So what sort of business will be really interested in external links. Now I wrote long blog post on this recently so I won’t cover it in exhaustive detail, but just give you some examples:

Let’s suppose you are a manufacturer. It’s likely that you have distributors and retailers who sell your products to either other businesses or consumers. In this case, referring the visitor to your website to a place where they can buy your products and services has obvious economic benefit.

Or perhaps you run a franchise. The value of the overall franchise and of each region that is licensed is dependent in part on the amount of business that the franchisees can transact. And you may have responsibility for “national marketing”. So your marketing ought to have an objective to boost the potential turnover of your franchise holders. So you’ll want outbound links to each franchisee.

Perhaps you run a portal or comparison site. Now it doesn’t need to be the size of last-minute.com comparethemarket.com for there to be good economic reasons why you’d want the value of business transacted by your clients (that’s those who pay for visibility on your portal) to increase. In these cases you’ll also want to know how much business or how many visitors are being sent to any one client website.

Other examples include affiliate schemes, educational colleges, local government… to name just a few

You’ll see that in fact most types of business & organisation do not exist in isolation. Their role is a part of the customer journey and the so-called value chain that the customer makes use of in satisfying their needs.

So If we’re going to implement best practice we’ll want to know the following as a minimum:
Which of the partner external sites were the most popular in a particular time frame.
Where did the people come from, who went to each of the particular external sites that we’ve listed on our website.

Now you’ll spot that if you have this information in an easily digestive for you’ll be in a much better position to have all sorts of discussions with the people who run the external sites to which you’re sending visitors.

Sometimes these will be formal business partners, or even subsidiaries.
On other occasions you may not yet have formed a relationship. But the popularity and source information will give you the excuse and the justification for having a discussion about the value that you are giving to the other site. That could assist you in developing a more formal business relationship.

Okay, so let’s go look at how we would collect and see this data in Google Analytics.

So I’ve constructed a simple example; and enlisted the help of my proprietary robot army again. That’s our tools that can send visitors to webpages in a way that will be seen by Google Analytics. And we can control, absolutely what these robots do…

In this example (like the one in the previous Analytics Half Hour) – looking at the user flow screen – they all started by going to a landing page, and then to a download page.

Now lots of them did nothing on the download page and disappeared. ( see the red line). Including all those who go to external sites.

So, you may ask, why did I show you this particular screen, given it doesn’t tell us what we wanted to know.

Well, I wanted to make a point which is that while these visitors are going to an external page; that page isn’t on your site and isn’t therefore usually going to be captured by Google Analytics.

So we have to do something a little special. We have to make sure that we capture distinguish the numbers of visitors going to the external sites we are interested in, from those who just bounce off somewhere else on the Internet, in our Google Analytics account.

So we’re going to use Google Analytics Events..

This is an important way of capturing information that isn’t a pageview (or screen if we’re talking about mobile)

There are a variety of ways to capture clicks
Direct javascript in the page
Using javascript libraries like Jquery…
Using other libraries that separate you from the code like Google Tag Manager…

Anyway enough of that – we’re not doing the technology piece here today..

So here I’ve made use of Google Analytics events on the downloads.php page with the links to the external sites. I’ve arranged to capture the clicks on each link. And you’ll see at the top that I’ve selected the page downloads.php so that I can look at that in isolation.

Now I’ve called the event category outbound referral. That will enable us to segregate this type of “analytics event” from all the other sorts of event that we may be capturing (for instance.
we’ll look at video and other events that you might capture in Google Analytics in a future session)

And you will see here a pattern of events sprinkled across recent days.

Now I’ve decided to delve into a bit more detail and decided to look at the event action and pick a secondary dimension of event label.

In this particular case I called the event action brochure download. That’s because in our example, I’ve assume that we were referring people to the external websites and they were going to download PDFs from those external sites. It’s important to realise, however, that each of the event category, event action and event labels are your choice. So you can call them whatever makes sense to your situation. Ideally you’ll set up a naming convention that is most appropriate to your circumstances – that’s a set of rules that everyone follows when they create events for your website.

So in the event label column I’ve got productE, productF, and productD. If I had real external websites I might have chosen the event labels to include the name of the external website, or business partner. So the event label might the companyA-productE.pdf.

So I hope you’re now able to see how we have tracked the popularity of the outbound links to particular resources on partner websites.
Now I’ve extended the analysis. And I’ve looked at the particular external resource, and asked the question. So where did the visitors come from.

So, back to our business scenario if we were being economically rewarded for the numbers of visitors that we could send to an external site. This report would enable us to compare and contrast our success across the various marketing channels that we’ve used.

But, importantly, it didn’t happen by accident. We did take care to add information to make sure we knew where people came from, and all so instrumented the page on which the outbound links occurred in order that we could get Google Analytics to compile the report for us.

So here I’m looking at the landing page again – selected up the top… and I’ve picked a second dimension of source/medium. Always a good one for telling you where people have come from…

And you can see that I’ve got the source & media nailed down. Now in many cases there will be direct – but it’s well worth working at (or getting help to work at) reducing the percentage of direct (the unknowns) as much as possible..

Categories (at top), then actions, then labels…

Worth keeping in a spreadsheet. Should be owned by marketing & the business. Not the web developer..
Part of my work is helping people see the value in naming conventions…and develop them..

The tendency is to view links that encourage people to leave your website (also called outbound links) as a necessary evil. To assume that minimising these is the best course of action.

And if they can’t be minimised – well the visitor’s is gone. Perhaps this view has been encouraged by the SEO community that tends to focus on “inbound links”.

But what if the referral is very much part of the customer journey?

What’s your Customer’s Journey like?

In this post , I’ll give a whole lot of reasons why event tracking of outbound links is important to businesses and other organisations. And since you’ve got google analytics why not use it. If some of these resonate with you then the analytics half-hour scheduled for 13 February will give you further insights on the kinds of reports that you could see in practice.

So to the business examples

But suppose you’re a manufacturer and you have a website that has details on lots of products and services you offer and you have a network of distributors and agents in various countries around the world. In this case it would be really useful to track by means of Google Analytics events. How many visitors you sent to each particular distributor or agent.

This would allow you to start a conversation with each distributor or agent about how effective the website was proving in sending potential customers. It would also allow you to compare the outcomes in various countries against the numbers of visitors sent to each country.

Let’s suppose that you run a franchise operation and you have a website that you advertise as a benefit to all of the franchisees. Again, it will be really useful to have Google Analytics events track and tell you how many visitors you’ve sent to each particular franchisee. You can imagine, by analogy with the example above that you will be able to compare the marketing assistance given to each franchisee and have conversations with them.

Another example would be portals and comparison sites. For some of these were the client websites will be paying customers and tracking by a variety of means would be really helpful in securing a contract renewal for your marketing services at the appropriate time.

There are of course huge websites that operate on this model: think of opodo.com for flight bookings, or last-minute.com

Apart from the huge websites; there can be quite small ones.

For instance, your local business community may have networking events and other activities and publicise the micro and small business members. At the point that a renewal is due or even throughout the year to give confidence to the membership, tracking by means of Google Analytics events can be really useful. The small and micro-businesses themselves may run so-called micro-sites whose purpose is to capture visitors and forward them to a particular section of another website. In the circumstances event tracking is also important.

There are any number of companies that offer their products and services over a wide geographical area and rely on local agents to either secure the sale or play some part in delivering the requested product or service.

But it’s not only the private sector that needs to look at event tracking using Google Analytics. A really important role for local government can be to signpost visitors to other agencies, organisations and charities that support the local community. For example, our local council have webpages that advertise the holiday activity clubs that are available for schoolchildren during school holidays. They also this the nurseries and other childcare facilities for preschool children.

Google Analytics Event Tracking can be a really useful way to understand the popularity of the various clubs and therefore how they can make themselves more popular with the voting adults in the local community.

Event tracking – make sure the footprints exist !

Educational institutions like further and higher education; and private schools may offer numbers of grants and bursaries from third parties. Because these potentially enable of additional applications – the colleges and schools are likely to be in favour. But knowing which of the various schemes appeared most popular might be extremely important in deciding what other schemes they should seek out and market to potential students.

In many cases students wanting to attend college will be focused on the job but they could secure. As a result. Some colleges will want to link directly to job sites that list apprenticeship opportunities in order that prospective students can get a taste of the kinds of job that might be available. In this particular guys the job. My support them through college, as well as the opportunity after completion of the course.

Okay, so the whole lot of business focused examples as to why event tracking using Google Analytics can be helpful. The good news is that I’m running an analytics half-hour to explain more about the reporting you can obtain if you follow best practice event tracking using Google Analytics.

So what other business reasons for tracking outbound links can you suggest ?

The business reasons for tracking PDF downloads are compelling. Are you getting as much information as you can?

This webinar walks through a example for a business that has 3 products (A,B, & C). We’ve assumed each product has it’s white paper. And we’ve set up Google Analytics to collect the really valuable information about what the visitors do. And we talk about some of the questions that senior management are enabled to ask given such high value information

FULL SCRIPT

Hello and welcome along to our analytics half-hour.

This afternoon we’re going to tackle the question that bugs many businesses who have high-value products and services. They want to provide access to a PDF brochures, white papers and other information that’s of interest to the serious prospect.

So in short when look at finding out which PDFs are the most popular and with whom.

Firstly why does this matter to a business? Well obviously you put in time and effort into producing the PDFs. And you’ve got groups of visitors on the website who decide either to download, get the PDF or to ignore it.

So if you do a similar PDF in the future. Wouldn’t it make sense to.

Know how popular the older PDF had been.

Know whether the page on which the PDF was had encouraged downloads or not.

Know whether the title of the PDF had been more or less effective.

And quite apart from that it would be useful to know which product or services your audience was more interested. So which of multiple products – ProductA vs productB vs ProductC.

And on the assumption that you’d like to sell product A , product B and product C, it would be useful to know where the best sources of visitors for these two products were. Because in normal situations; the costs of each advertising medium, each marketing channels differ.

So that afternoon we get a look at what best practice measurement can look like in Google Analytics.

And by looking at simulated real data you’ll be able to imagine just how powerful the information could be if collected correctly and applied to your business..

So let’s start by looking at the example

So I’ve constructed a simple example; and enlisted the help of a robot army. I should explain we’ve got tools that can send visitors to webpages in a way that will be seen by Google Analytics. And we can control, absolutely what these robots do…

In this example they all started by going to a landing page, and then to a download page.

Now some of them did nothing on the download page and disappeared. ( see the red line)

But others of them downloaded a brochure. Remember each brochure relates to a different product.

So you’ll see that this example is designed for those who may have a range of products that have different prices appeal to different people and need to know how to make their marketing spend stretch further.

If you sell services – the principle is exactly the same.

Normally the route through a website is much less clear – because people wander around. But the careful before you assume that that wandering is their fault. It can often be that people wander around because they’re unsure where the information for they are seeking is located. That is a problem with the website.

This view when correctly set up is one of the most useful views available. It allows you to see for a given call (in this case downloading product brochure, a) where people came from and by what means. This is a hard objective measure of the success of your marketing.

Now you can see we have made sure we’ve got “goals” configured in Google Analytics.

If you have this level of clarity of information. This graph and table alone could stimulate a very valuable discussion amongst the senior management.

Why is email producing the vast majority of goal completions?

Why is networking producing so few?

What do we have to show for our advertising on the trade association website?

Why are we not getting more visitors as a result of our activity on LinkedIn?

You’ll see that you can change which goal you’re looking at just by operating the drop-down.

So the techie would conclude the setup of goals (which we haven’t time to cover this today) is pretty important.

But the smart marketer should conclude that even more important is the ability to devise measurable activities (i.e. goals) that correspond with the objectives of the business. This is the real value of Analytics. Not accepting what you’ve been given – but setting out to get the information that’ll help.

Here we’ve identified the source (as a second dimension – see the button between the graph and the table) that led different numbers of visitors to the landing page.

And with this level of refinement, we’re starting to show effective various elements of marketing spend are. So we can ask pertinent questions…

Should we do more email?

How did we get the email addresses – was it from networking?

Are there side benefits does having a good relationship with the trade association bring – or is the web traffic the main justification?

And notice it’s not just the landing page. we can show further on down what caused people to get to the downloads page.

And having set the collection of data up correctly. We can then identify the origin of the visitors who were interested in the PDF for a particular product. E.g. ProductC

I want to pause at this point. While this wasn’t hard to achieve, the clarity with which we can see the results is very unusual in practice.

Few organisations seem to commit themselves to making sure that the source aka origin visitors is recorded on anything like a general basis.

More common is no goals, no recording of downloads… and I can only suppose that it’s because people don’t realise how much of a difference information that as clear as this could make.

]]>Standing looking at anonymous shoppers in a mall or a supermarket is very much like running a website and wondering what the visitors are doing. If you could understand better – then you’d be able to improve the results of your marketing and promotional efforts.

Many business people struggle with Google Analytics. Certainly NOT because they can’t; but more because they “can’t get into it”. The whole thing seems arcane and unrelated to their business. Start to uncover the secrets by watching this 3 minute video.

So:

what would you like to understand about the visitors to your website?

what experiments could you think of running?

what measurements would help you?

Going for a walk; or listening to a piece of music is more likely to help you answer these than staring at a screen full of numbers without a clear objective.

]]>Choosing Which Marketing Campaign to run isn’t easy. If you need sales leads and are concerned to spend wisely it’s critical.

Unless you know which campaigns produce the best results – you’ll be guessing what to do next.
All too often the campaign can be a well intentioned guess. And the hype around media and marketing choices doesn’t help. So you have to look outside the traditional marketing choices, beyond the hype.
Under analysed and under appreciated data holds the key. Get help to find out what’s worked well for you in the past so that you can repeat the winning strategies.

You have to think about where to spend it first. And thinking is the word to concentrate on.

Analytics is great – but too many training courses concentrate on the boring stuff – falling into the trap of telling people the magic numbers & key graphs. So most businesses continue to miss the point.

Deciding what your website’s for

Your website isn’t a toddler playground. It’s a business tool. Designed to create money.

So the purpose of Analytics is to help you sharpen your set of tools.

We’ve now got a regular series of webinars to help you refine your thinking – so you can get Google Analytics to start measuring the actions you care about.

It’ll help you think more like a detective – and learn to leverage the clues to discover more about your potential customers.

Many marketers and SEO people like to talk “bounce rate” – as though it is an accurate number and there is some target.

Those who are more sensible suggest that lower is better – but it depends on the circumstances.

As an Google Analytics Consultant – I’ve got a couple of stories to share about why Bounce Rate isn’t what it seems. First to define what we mean.

Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who hit one webpage on a site and leave the website (perhaps by closing the browser) without visiting any other pages.

One of the problems here is that your notion of “website” isn’t necessarily the same of the Analytics toolset.

For instance if Google Analytics code is missing from the second and subsequent pages that a person visits – then Analytics thinks a bounce has occurred. Now in simple cases it can be obvious the “code is missing”.

Of course this could occur if you simply omitted the code from all the pages. This kind of error was easy before content managed websites with templates came along.

But you can still do it fairly easily. Things to check

the template doesn’t run across all the pages.

there are iframes – so content from other sites forms part of a sequence

there are 3rd party sites such as payment gateways.

A second problem is the general one. Google Analytics can tell you “what” a user did; but not “why”.

So deciding what to do to reduce bounce rate is anything but obvious.

If the content is good, but the navigation on the website is hopeless then visitors may tend to wander around aimlessly looking for the ideal content.

If the navigation is good, but the content is hopeless then visitors might decide content isn’t for them

If the content is good – but the visitor misses the key points due to poor look and feel

etc. etc.

So you need to be really careful about bounce rate…

Do you have stories to share ?

No related posts.

]]>http://blog.kksmarts.com/marketing-errors-how-marketers-fail-to-use-google-analytics-properly/feed/2http://blog.kksmarts.com/marketing-errors-how-marketers-fail-to-use-google-analytics-properly/[Infographic] The Amazing History of the Internet: 1984 – Todayhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MoreBusinessFromWebTraffic/~3/PP0u3-FCUvI/
http://blog.kksmarts.com/infographic-the-amazing-history-of-the-internet/#respondWed, 06 Nov 2013 12:16:27 +0000http://blog.kksmarts.com/?p=2005Most people when asked, when was the internet created, or if you prefer, when was the internet invented, will probably struggle to answer the question. Many probably think it’s been around for ever whilst some may think it started with Facebook!

Back in 1984, when the internet started, I was at University (yes I am that old!) and I recall seeing it for the first time.

I remember not being that impressed!

However in my defense we were using it to send messages to the person sitting next to us in the same room.

Of course, back in those days we had plain green text on a black screens and our phones were connected to the wall by a wire (oh, and they had a dial on them!!).

Anyway, rather than make this a nostalgia blog post, I really wanted to show you the infographic that was shared with me recently. It charts the amazing growth of the internet since those early days back in 1984 to today. We sometimes forget how fast it has evolved and that it really hasn’t been around all that long.